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Introduction

this is the original guide published by bladestorm360however, i made some modifications because InstantTranslate not work anymore, and have put new download links to all programs that are needed to play Japanese games.clarification. I would not take credit for this, all credit is for bladestorm360I just publish this guide so that everyone can continue to enjoy the Japanese games.

This guide will cover, in detail, how to play japanese audio games without knowing a single bit of the language. It is my hope that after reading it, you will be able to pick up any untranslated japanese game and play it with no trouble. Japanese audio games are easily some of the best around, far above what we've got available in the english market, and I hate to see people missing out on playing these masterpieces. There are several utilities out there that make playing these games very possible without knowing the language at all, and this guide will show you what they are, and how to get and use them.Note that this translation method is not perfect. Because japanese grammar structure is so much different than english grammar, words are often scrambled and ocasionally mistranslated. I can tell you from experience though, that it is very possible to understand the storyline, puzzles and mechanics of these games with a great degree of accuracy. I have beaten every game created by these 3 developers, and have understood the storyline of them all. Try not to be put off by the scrambled nature of the wording, it takes some practice but it can definitely be unscrambled into something that makes sense.

Setup:

This will get you up and running with all of the japanese games. Some steps are fairly complex, so please only do what you're comfortable with. If something seems overcomplicated or you just don't want to mess with it, you shouldn't have to. Only the first 3 steps are necessary to play everything but the text games, all other steps are completely optional.1. Install NVDA. If you've never used it before, you may wish to read a bit of documentation or experiment to get a feel for the screen reader.2. Install the InstantTranslate AddOn package. If you have NVDA running, you can simply navigate to the directory you saved these in and press enter on it.3. Download the Textgame patch. This was initially only for the text games, but it helps with the regular games as well. This prevents you from having to install the japanese keyboard and IME, unless you want to.Once downloaded, unzip the patch somewhere, and then copy the hook.dll and Launch files into the folder of the game you want to play. Now make sure that the games executable is renamed to play.For many of the games, this is already the case. But if not, you'll need to rename it for launch to work properly. Once done, run launch and the game will start.Note that if playing Morokuma's Text Games, or if you want window titles or the first menu of Shadow Line to translate correctly, you will need to either change your system locale or run launch through AppLocale. More on this later.You should now have everything installed that you need to play games such as Bokurano Daiboukenn and Brave of Cloudia. However, there is one optional step that may help you out:4. Download and install ClipCopy. It installs like the other NVDA Addon Packages. You can now press f12 to copy the last spoken NVDA message to the clipboard. This is very useful for games like Bokurano Daiboukenn 3, and Shadow Line Full Voice, that start out attempting to auto-detect your screen reader. If this happens, text will not be automatically copied to the clipboard, and this can help you get to the game options so that you can set it to use the clipboard instead of a screen reader. This could also be used to play japanese games that only use a screen reader and have no clipboard output function, though I know of no such games at this time.If you wish to play Morokuma's text RPGs, you'll need to take the steps below:5. Either download AppLocale, or change your system locale to japanese through the control panel. This is necessary in order to allow the characters that are not output to the clipboard to be displayed correctly, such as the menues and window titles.To change your locale, you'll need to go to region and language, administrative tab, change system locale to do this under windows7. This requires a computer restart. It will not change anything about your computer's english display, it will only allow non unicode programs to display japanese correctly.If you're using AppLocale, start the wizard and select launch program. Use browse to navigate to the folder of the game you want to play. Your Textgame patch should be properly installed, so select launch. Now press next and select the language. Japanese is the language at the very bottom of the list. If you're using ProTalker English, NVDA will say Nihongo, or Nee Hohn go. Press next again. If you choose to create a shortcut, it's created in the start menu, under Microsoft AppLocale. You can move it to the folder of the game you want and it will still work. I recommend this if you plan to create shortcuts for each game. You can also just name the shortcut and run them from the start menu.6. This step is optional, but will add a lot of atmosphere to the Text Games. Download and install Virtual Midi Synth. You'll also want to grab a good sound font. I recommend FluidR3GM, which can be found in the listing on the Midi Synth download page.If you wish to hear the games spoken in japanese:7. Download and install ClipBoard2Sapi. If you install it using AppLocale or you're otherwise trying to run it with your locale set to english, you will need to change the executable to an english name. I just called mine Clipboard. I don't know why this is necessary, but if you don't rename it, it says something about a missing file and will not launch the application.Now, you'll either need a japanese Sapi Voice, or ProTalker English. If you're using ProTalker, after you've installed the AddOn, press NVDA Control S to bring up the synthesizer list and select ProTalker English. the NVDA key is the insert key, or Num Pad 0. Now the synthesizer can detect english and japanese, and will switch to them accordingly.The other alternative is to install the Dual Voice complement that fulfills the same function as pro talker, but with some differences. Dual Voice lets you use two voices SAPI 5 or two voices microsoft speech platform, one in Japanese and the other in the language we want, in our case english. So the Japanese voice will read the texts in Japanese, and the other will read the translated texts.To tell Clipboard2Sapi to speak through NVDA, after you've launched the application, press enter twice. Press down arrow once, and enter, then up arrow and enter. Make sure you hear a sound between every key press, as sometimes the program lags and if you don't hear a sound, these instructions will not work.You can also use ClipReader, a program that does basically the same thing as Clipboard2Sapi. This runs in the background and lets NVDA read the clipboard without any other setup. It requires you to have SayTools installed in order to work properly. However, when I use InstantTranslate, because the translated text is copied to the clipboard, it is all read twice. I don't know how to fix this, or if there's even a way. Clipboard2Sapi does not have this problem.There is one last optional step you can take. This is useful for reading game documentation, such as readme and change logs. It can also help with reading certain messages character by character if you need to, such as the synthesis recipes in Bokurano Daiboukenn 3:8. Download Notepad2. You have several options here, everything from full installation that replaces regular notepad, to a portable version that touches nothing else. Choose what you prefer.The reason you need this utility is because it can change encoding of documents on the fly. You can change the encoding of an existing file, or you can change the encoding of a newly created file and paste or type text into it. Here's how:To change the encoding of an existing file, simply open the file and press f8. It will bring up a list of encoding types. Select Japanese (Shift Jis) and press enter. If it says you risk losing any non-unicode symbols, select yes to proceed. You should now be able to translate any text in the document correctly.Changing the encoding of a newly created file is similar, but you press f9 instead of f8. You want to do this before pasting or typing any japanese text into the file, as you will have to save it and then change the encoding if you do so. Many times these files will be temporary unless you spacifically want to store a piece of information from a game, so you will usually not want to save them. However, now you can paste any text copied to the clipboard from the game and have it display and translate correctly in a notepad document. Useful for, say, translating a recipe one ingredient at a time, or carefully going over the pieces of a puzzle line by line.Now you can go download any games you'd like to play if you haven't already, and prepare for pure awesomeness. I recommend starting simple. You can either start with Morokuma's text games, Tia Story 1 and 2, for something basic and turn based, or if action RPGs are more your thing, try Shadow Line from MM's site. The interface is simple for an action RPG, though beginners may have a little trouble with navigation.

How to Play:

Firstly, the japanese installers work somewhat differently from how you might expect. They're basically just self-extracting applications that put a folder containing the game in the directory you run them from, though some give you a choice of path. You can unzip a lot of them with tools like 7Zip. Extract the game you want to play.If you're playing a game like Bokurano Daiboukenn or Brave of Cloudia, all you need to do now is run the application. The beauty of many of these games, is that text is automatically copied to the clipboard as it is output by the game. I think this has something to do with how some of the japanese screen readers work, but regardless, it definitely goes in our favor. So say you're playing Shadow Line for example. When you start the game, you'll hear the logo. After the logo, you'll hear the music start, and then you'll hear some brief beeps. This is text being output to the game, in an older RPG style similar to Dragon Warrior. Now, if you press NVDA shift Y, you will actually hear the title spoken, ShadowRine. I will always say Shadow Line, but apparently it is actually titled ShadowRine and it isn't a grammar mistake. Anyway, you see how this is going to work. The game automatically outputs text to the clipboard, you press a keystroke, and that clipboard text is translated. Simple, eh? This is pretty much all you need to play Shadow Line. If you press enter, you'll be taken to the menu. As you arrow through, you can press the same keystroke, Control plus NVDA plus Y, to hear the menu options translated. It's not as quick as if you could just hear the speech output as you hit the arrow keys, as you would in an english game, but it definitely works, and you just get used to it after a while. This is really all you need to know to play games like Shadow Line, BK 1 and 2, and Brave of Cloudia.Now, for the text RPG's. These are made in a program called Text Game Maker, which just happens to complicate things a little. These include games like Tia Story, Alternative Magic and Momotaro's Adventure. For these, you need to take a couple of extra steps. Much of the text is still output to the clipboard, so that part still works. There's only two places where you need to do things a little differently.The menues are displayed in convensional listboxes. So as you can imagine, as you arrow over the choices, they aren't output to the clipboard. To translate these, what you need to do is just hit NVDA plus num pad 5 3 times, and the item you're currently focused on will be copied to the clipboard. Then you just use the normal translation keystroke and there you have it, a translated menu option. This will get you through battles, shops, and anywhere else in the game that includes a menu, which happens to be a lot since these games are all based on choices and there's no actual walking around.The second difference is the statistics screens. If you press tab when you're on a main screen, like the battle screen or the main screen of a town, you can enter the stats screens. The first one shows your money, and a brief overview of your characters vital statistics. If you continue to tab through, you can see each character displayed in detail. What you need to do to translate these, is select text using shift and the arrow keys. I recommend translating line by line, so just find the text you want and press shift plus down arrow. Then, press NVDA shift T to translate selected text. See? Not so bad. This way, you can read up on your characters statistics without having to copy the entire thing to the clipboard and listen to it in one ridiculously long, jumbled mess.Finally, if you're using Clipboard2Sapi, pay close attention to the japanese and don't instantly translate every option. After a while, especially if you're good at picking up languages, things should start to relate in your mind. This will make gameplay much smoother and more like playing an english game, especially for going through menues quickly without having to translate every time or memorize the menues. Using Clipboard2Sapi, I am able to read the stats of weapons in bk3, go through menues quickly, even in the text games, read statistics without having to translate them and just generally play much faster. This only works, however, if you don't mind using the eSpeak voice, but I highly recommend it if you can get it set up.Well, that's about all there is to it. You now know how to play japanese games using a translator. I only have one tip left to give you, and that's how to use the slot machines in some of the text games. In order to do this, the Clipboard2Sapi utility is absolutely necessary. Load it up if you aren't using it already and make sure it is speaking through NVDA or using a sapi voice that can speak very rapidly. Now if you find a slot machine in a game, when you start the slots, you'll hear a whole bunch of japanese characters going by at a fast rate. If ProTalker isn't fast enough, you can always switch your synthasizer to regular eSpeak and turn up the rate. You'll need to have your screen reader set very fast to play these slots. What you need to do is match up similars that sound exactly the same, by pressing enter as the symbol scrolls by. If you match 3 in a row, you win coins. This is actually one of the hardest parts of these games, but if you can master it, it'll make playing them a lot easier in terms of getting power and equipment.

In Closing:

That should be everything you need to know to play japanese games well.One final thing. Please keep in mind that this guide is very much optomised for windows7. I am unsure how much of it, if any, will work under other versions of windows. If anyone has anything to contribute on how to set these games up under Windows8 or Windows XP, please let me know and I'll add it to the guide. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy playing these great games.

clarifications and use of Q Translate:

Because it is known that Instant Translate has many problems since the APY google payment was made, and therefore is not working right now. We found a very similar method for to play japanese audiogames without problems.Download q translate to leave at first, run by pressing enter and it will automatically extract a folder called q translate, from there, press Enter on q translate.exe and here comes the interesting part.This version of q translate addition to being portable, and is configured to translate Japanese to English, and comes with some keyboard shortcuts that make everything more dynamic.Once the program is open, you can close it with alt f4. This will be minimized in the system tray unless you close the process from the task manager or exit from the same translator.To use Q translate, you must press Control plus comma, This translates the text copied to the clipboard.and after waiting a few seconds, you can press NVDA more C for to hear the translated text from the clipboard.This is all you need to know to keep playing Japanese games. As mentioned, one must run the program once, and after that you can close with alt f4 and continue translating.Note: for some strange configuration NVDA, this no verbalize with NVDA key more C when the translated text copied to the clipboard is too long. One way to solve this and even make it more dynamic, is to use clip reader or ClipBoard2Sapi, so NVDA verbalize text from the clipboard when this has already been translated. I recommend using either of these two applications to save having to tighten insert more c each time you want to hear the message translated copied to the clipboard.Other useful keyboard shortcut is Alt more control over reverse (the key above the big enter) this brings the window forward q translate, if you want to change the translation from one language to another.

Notes:

Original publication in audiogames.net from bladestorm360's, 1 thing left for this guide is complete. This is the podcast that bladestorm360's Made.Please, if anyone has the podcast, let me know and I'll add it to the guide.My i-mail is [email protected]

Credits:

These are just some people I'd like to thank. If it weren't for them, this guide probably wouldn't exist at all, or at the very least it'd be much more complicated.Firstly, the 3 major japanese game developers: Nyanchan Games, The House of Morokuma and Galaxy Laboratory. These people make the absolute best games around, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next. I don't know how many of them will read this, but you guys are amazing, keep up the great work.Tyler Spivey: For making so many useful utilities and AddOns to make playing much more convenient. He is responsible for ClipReader, ClipCopy, ProTalker English and the Textgame patch, all of which help out a lot.Aleksey Sadovoy, Ruslan and Beqa for making the InstantTranslate NVDA AddOn. You guys made translating these games so much easier. Before we had to paste each individual piece of text into google translate. Awesome work!Florian Balmer, for creating Notepad2. I can't imagine you even thought of your program being used for this when you created it, but it's very useful all the same, and for many other things as well.Federico Opitz, for setting up a Q Translate replacing to instant translate while this does not work, or even giving an other alternative to play the Japanese audiogamesAnd finally to anyone else who made suggestions for this guide I didn't think of. If I missed anyone, please let me know and I'll be sure to add you to this section.